I’m still in a state of disbelief that Fallout 4 is coming this November. Not because I think it’ll be delayed, but simply because I waited for so long for its existence to be confirmed that that it is less than a month away feels like a dream. Say those words in January, you’d be weighed down with rocks, set on fire, and cast into the river just for getting people’s hopes up.
The other absurd thing about Fallout 4’s release being so soon is that we still know pretty much nothing about it. We don’t know much about the gameplay, and we know absolutely nothing about the story. That’s extraordinarily rare for a AAA game, a welcome surprise, and also something that scares the hell out of me. Because it makes me think it will be a lot like Fallout 3, one of my favorite games ever – which would be a very bad thing.
And that’s going to take a lot of explaining. And lots of series spoilers.
I’ve spent, roughly, 1000 hours between Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. I’ve played through the rest of series at least three times. They are the games I return to when I need to be reminded of just how wonderful games can be. But the division of time between Fallout 3 and New Vegas is not equal – New Vegas owns the split by just over 100 hours. That is a lot of time. What, exactly, was it about New Vegas that made me spend an extra five days in its wasteland?
I spent a lot of time thinking about that in the lead up to Fallout 4, and I came up with a Critical Theory of Fallout.
That theory being: the best Fallout games are mythological, post-apocalyptic retellings of American history. Fallout 1 is a reworking of the American Revolution, with the Master and the Super Mutants as King George and his Royal Army. Fallout 2’s reuses the setup of the War of 1812, with former masters of America (the Enclave) coming back to fight a fledgling new nation (the NCR). And New Vegas is perhaps the most interesting: a retelling of Manifest Destiny, or the mass-expansion of the United States’ western border at the expense (understatement) of Native American tribes, with New Vegas and its surrounding settlements representing the tribes (pay attention, the game deliberately refers to them as tribes) and the NCR, Legion, and House representing different sides of the United States’ treatment of Natives.
These games very much trade in America’s mythological memory of these events rather than historical fact, exaggerating them all for a thematic point. The George analogue is a telepathic mutant, an exaggerated metaphor for America’s view of monarchy, but was also created by American hubris in the Pre-War era. The English, unlike the Enclave, did not actually seek to retake the United States – though that was the public opinion of the time – but the conquerors in Fallout 2 are literally the pre-nuclear holocaust American government that the NCR is attempting to emulate. Their actual actions do bear similarity, however – The Enclave kidnapping Vault Dwellers for experimentation, the English kidnapping American sailors and forcing them to work on their ships. Not the same, but analogous. And New Vegas actually challenges you to fight the history of the United States, if you follow the thematic train of thought left by its companions and DLC – everything points you towards its “No Gods, No Masters” ending, where you take New Vegas for yourself, choosing to refute history itself and making you the thematic bullet through the American past.
Fallout 3, however, does not. You’ll notice there isn’t a specific thing I’m saying it does not do, and that’s on purpose. It simply does not. Fallout 3 has less than zero aspirations of being about anything – often, in fact, it actively works to refute any thematic underpinnings it could have. The hoopla it makes about Revelation 21:6, and “Alpha and Omega, beginning and the end”? The DLC Broken Steel makes you survive the game’s conclusion no matter what, removing the option to become the Omega by sacrificing yourself, and forcing you into the same position as a player who chose to ignore it by sacrificing Sarah Lyons. The placement of Project Purity (an operation to purify all radiated water in the Washington D.C. basin) at the Jefferson Memorial, named for the person who drafted the American Declaration of Independence and where the Lone Wanderer was born? That could bring some solid thematic material to mine, but the Jefferson Memorial has next to none of the actual details of the real life memorial – not the quote about the changing nature of man, none of his accomplishments, and you can’t even see the statue of him until the very end of the game and that’s briefly. It makes it seem accidental. Like they only chose the Jefferson Memorial because it was close to the shore.
But maybe you could spot a pattern in that to try and make a case for Fallout 3 making a comment on our misuse of history. There is Abraham Washington, with his bastardized museum of American history in Rivet City, President Eden spouting pre-war Americana over the radio, Three Dog fighting the Good Fight as a disc jockey who doesn’t know what a disc is. The Brotherhood of Steel headquartered in the Pentagon.
I don’t buy it because Fallout 3 revels too much in how cool the 50’s aesthetic of Fallout is to turn it inward as the other games do. Abraham Washington’s wacked out history is treated as a light joke – ha-ha, history being messed up is wacky – and you can’t do anything to correct it and, Fallout 3 almost seems to imply, why would you want to? It’s kind of cool and very funny. Three Dog not knowing what a disc is a funny background element that adds charm to his character, the Enclave eyebots that spout Eden’s nonsense about baseball in-between performances of “Yankee Doodle” – flavor text.
And that can be stretched to apply to all of the iconic things from Fallout 3. There should be some kind of darkly hilarious thematic point to your first encounter with a post-nuclear settlement being a town literally built around an atomic bomb, but there isn’t. It’s “cool.” There should be some thematic point to using the Tranquility Lane computer simulation to travel into the past to find your dad, some kind of reference to how that is literally what we are doing by playing the game, but there isn’t. And the climactic action sequence with Liberty Prime, the giant robot? Against the actual government of the United States, set in the place where the government once lived, using a robot designed to fight America’s Communist enemies? “Man, this is cool.”
And it’s deliriously cool. The experience of playing Fallout 3 for the first time is one of the most wonderful gaming memories I have. There’s a reason Megaton, Tranquility Lane, the reveal of President Eden’s identity, and Liberty Prime are some of the most iconic moments of 21st century gaming. They are undeniably amazing moments. But they are only that; amazing moments, that add up to something less than their potential whole. And I think that’s because Fallout 3 lacks the secret weapon of the Fallout series – irony.
Fallout 1 finds irony in that The Master used to be a simple trader named Richard Grey, a wastelander just like everyone else, torn apart by a Forced Evolutionary Virus created by the United States – something that provides interesting context to the idea that The Master is a stand-in for King George. Fallout 2 milks the dueling American governments, Enclave of the old and NCR of the new, for all the irony it can muster – look to the Enclave’s plan, which is using an airborne strain of that FEV to kill everything irradiated, which means everyone, in a cleansing – literally erasing its past and killing the future.
And New Vegas is draped in irony like Vegas is in sin, with every side of the Mojave conflict not wanting to admit how dangerously similar they are, or that their adversaries might be right. They represent the torn, modern American consciousness struggling to reconcile how it views itself with the atrocities it turns upon itself. This is not merely subtext, supported by the inserting of modern American weapons like the M4 Carbine to make you feel more comfortable attaching your modern mindset to the word, and dowsing the game in classic Wild West imagery to evoke the time period it examines, New Vegas outright tells it to you. This is what Lonesome Road’s villain Ulysses monologues to you about: finding current purpose in the destruction of the past.
Lonesome Road, New Vegas’ last DLC, is about this very concept of turning yourself inward to examine your relationship with history and own your past actions. What the Courier did in Hopeville is what America did to Native Americans in our world and what nuclear annihilation did in the Fallout universe: we the players did not know what the Courier did prior to our becoming connects our relationship to the darker parts of our history in the present day, using the selective pasts of video game protagonists against us. This is the challenge that New Vegas represents to its historical recreation of Manifest Destiny; where other games have traded in re-enactment of history with new characters and histories, New Vegas forces you to reckon with the historical relationship between Fallout’s alternate universe and our own, and dare to change it.
In this way, New Vegas and its DLC lay out the ideology of a Fallout game. It is draped in its alternate history elements, but understands the importance of tying them together on a semiotic level so that they speak to some greater purpose. Fallout does this through irony, reversals, and counter arguments against the history it is rewriting and recreating and altering. It understands how to balance cool elements and healthy insincerity.
Fallout 3 does not do this. Instead of irony, Fallout 3 plays everything completely straight, which would work if it was trying to Dr. Strangelove itself as a satire, but it doesn’t. Fallout 3 is completely, 100% sincere. It unabashedly believes that Tranquility Lane is super cool to walk around, doing nothing with the thematic chip shot that is its purpose as a deadly Lotus-Eater Machine for a mad scientist torturing subjects with the past. It earnestly believes that Liberty Prime is just a really awesome robot, and that its bizarre anti-communism rantings are just funny. Fallout 3 does not present a counter-point to any of its 50s future-Americana. It presents no counter-arguments. Fallout 3 simply does not.
It isn’t that these pieces and places aren’t cool. It certainly doesn’t make me regret the 400 hours I spent wandering the ruins of Washington D.C. over the course of a dozen playthroughs.
But it does represent a colossal missed opportunity. Fallout 3’s refusal of irony, of self-awareness, of the ability to look inward at the reasons for these things’ existence, removes any capability for it to mean something more. Fallout 3 lives in Washington D.C, a city of monuments to America, and makes nothing more of those monuments than bombing them out for an amazing image.
And that makes me frightened of Fallout 4. Not because it appears to play like Fallout 3, or be going in a more action oriented direction, or even that it doesn’t have a definitive ending – but because of where it is set. Bethesda’s latest is set in Boston. For the uninitiated, Washington D.C may be the actual capital of the United States, but Boston? Boston is where the United States was built.
Scattered in and around present day Boston are the memories of the American Revolutionary War. The site of the “Boston Massacre,” the Boston Tea Party, the Battle of Bunker Hill, the Old North Church where the lanterns hung, the battles of Lexington and Concord – the first battles of the war. Our first armies, our first war dead, our first patriots, our first traitors. Boston would become, in a period before the American Civil War, the home of the anti-slavery movement in the north. It would struggle with its own prejudices against Irish immigrants, Jewish individuals, and even African-Americans during the Industrial Revolution (an issue reflected across America during the late 1800s-early 1900). The city of Boston and the state of Massachusetts are the breeding grounds for all of American legend. It was where the foundations of the United States were forged, where the myth of America was written as we remember it, and visible in its history is much of the journey of America itself, more so than anywhere else.
Combine that with what we know of Fallout’s Boston. We know Boston is much more of an industrial city than anywhere else we’ve encountered in Fallout. We know it is dominated by a hyper-advanced technological group known as The Institute. From Fallout 3, we know that The Institute has an issue with runaway androids – their mechanical slaves. We know there is The Railroad, attempting to help escaped androids. We know that the androids believe themselves to have free thought, to be sentient.
In a perfect world, Fallout 4 falls into the Great Operating Theory of Fallout almost by default. This Fallout becomes a retelling of the Industrial Revolution – America finally rebuilding itself into a state of modernity again. And in rebuilding, it would come across the same issues that we did: who counts as a person? How will we control people? How will we reformat society? How much of the old America will matter in the new one? In the dirt where America was built, the Sole Survivor, a person literally of the world people are trying to reassemble, will decide what the next America will look like both on a large scale with Boston and a small scale with the player-created settlements. A top-down marriage of mechanics and thematics. And do it all with laser muskets, suits of powered armor, a sweet ass dog, and some swing music because this is Fallout. And Fallout rules.
But this is not a perfect world. Fallout 3 established Bethesda as a company capable of building an incredible game with some of the most memorable moments in gaming history that also fumbles every pound of thematic weight it could have possibly had – failing at really being a Fallout game, by my definition.
We don’t actually know that Bethesda won’t use Boston to its fullest potential. We don’t know if it won’t be a true Fallout game in theme and tone. It could be, and I hope it is. But this is the problem with not knowing anything about Fallout 4 less than a month from release: it places the game in a dangerous land of hope and dreams where people will think about it constantly. And when people think about a game constantly, they build constructs of what that game could be in their head. Constructs like a Critical Theory of Fallout.
And constructs like that can make someone worry that the thing they are excited for, even if that thing will still be great, won’t live up to the construct.
